Well, for the benefit of the handful who read my blog “Preparing For a Siege,” the good news is that my house didn’t get ransacked last night. The bad news is that I was tooled up, pumped up and ready to go and the local police presence I scoffed at was more than adequate to deter the drongos milling in the town centre. However, I’m not going to let petty resentments get in the way of an analysis of the situation.

The pictures today of police officers clad in riot gear with body armour, helmets and shields prompted me to think of our armed forces. I know they carry weapons but they are faced with opponents who are usually also heavily armed with murderous intent. Most of the opponents our police forces have been faced with over the last few days have been Squirts, unprotected and largely unarmed, some as young as ten years old. Yet our police force was largely unable or unwilling to get involved while shops were being looted, until that is the police were outnumbering the opposition. A police officer stood by, calling up his colleagues whilst a middle aged man was beaten close to death. Someone said on here recently that they are haunted by the Tomlinson experience. Mr. Tomlinson if you remember was an unarmed, unhealthy middle-aged man who had nothing to do with that disturbance. It took absolutely no courage on the part of the officer involved, to beat him to the ground.

I am not anti-police. My own father was a policeman, and I have always numbered odd coppers amongst my friends but we are clearly not training our law enforcers properly and possibly recruiting the wrong types. Our armed forces are fully aware that they may be called upon to lay their lives on the line, especially if it will help to save the lives of civilians. That is not true any more of our police forces, though it is of our fireman and in some cases our para-medics. The main reason we all feel so vulnerable now is that we do not feel we can rely on our supposed protectors to stand between us and imminent danger or even between us and unruly children bent on theft.

One of the rare advantages of residing in the poverty-stricken suburb of South London where I’m writing this is that there is little to attract pillagers or looters, at least that’s that’s what I thought until an hour ago. I have just ventured into our town centre where charity shops and £1 shops proliferate and where the only items of any worth are to be found on the booze shelves of the two supermarkets and umpteen licensed grocers. By 4.30pm every single shop in town apart from an unlicensed Asian greengrocer, was shuttered and bolted. The pedestrianised centre was milling with small gangs of predominantly black youths who were being stopped and questioned by the dozen or so police officers there. The youths were laughing in the police officers faces, one of them was openly smoking a spliff. Among the regular officers were three or four police support workers who looked terrified. Apparently someone has put the word round that tonight is the night to start knocking over houses.

The shops as mentioned above are likely to yield nothing more than alcohol or cheap pencils and heavily discounted washing powder, yet something is clearly brewing. At the corner of the residential area where I live there is a gang of maybe six very hard looking white men in their late twenties or early thirties, some of whom are extremely drunk and appear to have dropped by to watch the fun. Now of course I hope that nothing untoward happens but if it does kick off I have no confidence that the presence of the police already in the town centre will make the slightest difference. They have no obvious back-up, no cars or vans in which to put the youngsters who are refusing to provide ID or to give adequate reasons for hanging around a closed down shopping centre.

I have told my daughter to stay where she is some miles away with her boyfriend’s family and not to attempt to drive home. Just down the road from here a number of motorists were pulled from their cars last night and their cars stolen by rioters. It is perfectly clear that the level of violence in these riots is going to escalate and people are going to die. There are no sports goods shops, computer or TV stores in this area. The only reason to gather for a riot in this neighbourhood is to create merry hell for those who live here.

People will always defend their homes and families more rigorously than retail merchandise.I am already ensuring that a number of blunt, heavy objects are to hand with which to do so. After a life-time of work I did not expect to spend my retirement under siege from work-shy yobbos who think laying waste to other people’s homes is funny, nor did I expect to feel that unless I defend myself and my home no-one else will. Who knows if any would-be rioters log into his blog site I might frighten them away. I’ll keep you posted.

The sight of gangs of black teenagers rioting, burning and looting is bound to affect the way other ethnic groups view the black community. It could hardly do otherwise, especially for those people who have little or no contact with Afro-Caribbean s. I split my time between an area of South London with a huge concentration of blacks, Asian and Eastern Europeans and a country town which is almost entirely white-British. Unsurprisingly many of the inhabitants of the country town fear that one day their part of Little England will one day suffer from an immigrant invasion. Few actually know any black people, let alone have any non-white friends and will deduce from today’s headlines that violence and dishonesty run deep through any black society. That is not true, the looters and pillagers, like the drug dealers and muggers form a tiny part of the black population.… Read more

The juxtaposition of two stories in today’s Daily Telegraph must give one pause for serious thought. On page 3 is the mildly amusing report of super-hero crime-fighters on the streets of Torquay, opposite on page 2 is the story of the Chief Constable of Cleveland and his deputy who have both been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, fraud by abuse of position and corrupt practice.

The super-heroes are being featured in a Channel 4 documentary and the DT article is having some fun with the story. There is however a darker tale behind this. As an occasional and recent visitor to Torquay I have learned that at week-ends the town centre is a no-go area for sensible citizens. I was there for a mid-week funeral and commented to various people that it seemed quite pleasant. “Not at week-ends,” they all said. Then the town is taken … Read more

Cameron’s latest wheeze to introduce Government by petition, has once again raised the spectre of capital punishment. This of course cannot be re-introduced while we are members of the EU but that hasn’t stopped radio phone-in guests from saying they would support its re-introduction. In fact the latest opinion polls suggest that the general public, albeit by a small majority, are in favour of it being brought back. The phone-in guests I listened to last night were saying they would have no hesitation whatsoever in administering the poison, pulling the lever or firing the gun. What on earth does that say about them? It is easy when filled with hatred and anger at some horrendous act like the Soham murders to adopt a vengeful stance. I suspect however, that if these people were faced with the prospect of coolly executing someone in the cold light of day, some serious doubts would begin to creep into their subconscious. The reason we used to have professional hangmen for whom it had usually been a family business, handed on from father to son, was because most normal people would not have wanted, or been able, to do it when the time came, and this was at a time when many men had experienced and seen violence during the World Wars. One of my greatest misgivings about the reintroduction of such a drastic punishment is to do with the effect it would have on the people who would have to do it. Anyone who would relish the task should surely be deemed unsuitable to do it.

We are going though another yet wave of national concern about binge drinking and soaring levels of alcoholism among the populace. Every politician in the country shares this concern, even the drunks who get subsidised booze in the MPs bars. It would be much easier to take this seriously if the powers that be didn’t always come up with the same solutions, like issuing strict guidelines on how much booze is bad for us, or in whacking up taxes and calling on retailers to stop discounting the stuff. None of these measures has ever worked before but that doesn’t stop our leaders from adhering to them.

I worked in Fleet Street during the Lunchtime O’Booze years and met several alcoholics and many, many more heavy drinkers. There is a difference. In some cases the heavy drinkers consumed more booze than their alcoholic mates, the difference was that the alcoholics couldn’t stop once they had started, whereas the heavy drinkers could and did. Once they were away from Fleet Street they almost all drank far less, some didn’t drink at all at week-ends and hardly at all on family holidays.

There was a very good reason why Fleet Street was awash with drunks in those days and it wasn’t just that we plied our “contacts” with sauce to loosen their tongues. It was because booze was always readily available. Even during the days when pubs adhered to strict licensing hours any hack worth his note-pad knew how and where to get the evil stuff out-of-hours. The back-streets of Fleet Street were full of private drinking clubs which served all day, while Covent garden and Smithfield Market, just a beer-mat’s throw away, had all night pubs.

Journalism has largely cleaned up its booze culture partly because of pressure of work, but also because the writing fraternity no longer has almost exclusive access to 24-hour drinking. There is no longer anything special about it. Anyone who can pass for being over-18 and with money to burn can now get trolleyed whenever they want. Our Governors impose increasingly stringent rules on the traditional pubs, forcing a key part of our culture into extinction yet local councils grant off-licences to almost any shop which asks for one. They refuse to acknowledge that pubs are no longer allowed to sell alcohol to anyone who is already inebriated while small shop-keepers do not make that distinction. Supermarkets are manned by security guards and demand ID from anyone who looks under 25, so it should be bloody obvious even to dim politicians that under-age binge drinkers are not purchasing there poison there. However, in the London suburb where I reside the only small shops which do not sell alcohol are the barbers, the undertakers, a few estate agents, one shoe shop and a florist. All the others do and none of them have the back-up to deny either drunks or under-age drinkers. These retailers are generally open 7 days a week from 6.30am until 10pm and booze accounts for a massive proportion of their total sales.

When booze sales were strictly regulated in this country thousands of Brits flooded over to the Continent to spend two weeks every year in a stupor. We were all so thrilled in those days to be able able to buy our bread and Bacardi in the same location. How sophisticated, what a grown up attitude towards drinking it seemed to represent. It doesn’t seem like that any longer. When I hear that my local council is refusing a drinks licence to a tiny newsagent, I might accept that our politicians are genuinely concerned about the country’s diseased livers. Until then I wish they would just muzzle their “concern.”